SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Five classrooms in the city are full of toddlers preparing for grade school using an early-childhood teaching method now celebrating it's 40th year in the city.

Using an eyedropper to drop dye into jars of water, four-year-old Kaden Shaefer learns hand-eye co-ordination at Montessori School, now celebrating 40 years in the city. - Evan Kiyoshi French/NNSL photo

Denise Araya, executive director for NWT Montessori Society, said children are enrolled as soon as they're potty trained to take guidance under a system founded by Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori more than 100 years ago. Last week Araya toured the daycare on 52 Street and observed the children working at their own pace to learn the basics of geometry, math and language in a way that makes it all seem like play.

"There's a lot of introduction to math, they're learning about size and volume,"she said. "And even how to build things - there's a little mechanical engineering in there."

At one station students use multi-coloured blocks to replicate a complicated tower shown to them in a photograph. At another, they fit together small triangles to form larger ones and at another they learn to arrange textured numbers - from one to ten - to teach them both the order and feel of the shape of the figures.

Emereigh Moffat, 3, went to work shaking cylinders filled with different-sized grains in a task to teach her how to differentiate between sounds. Araya said the lesson doesn't just teach the students, but helps teachers identify students who may have hearing complications.

Sahara Morin said she enrolled her daughter Nico in the Montessori preschool when she was two-and-a-half years old. She also just put her three-year-old son Luka Morin into the program this year. Morin said she feels the unique station-based system is giving her children skills they need to succeed at higher levels, while getting them excited about it.

"It really empowered them to learn and to be interested in learning,"she said. "The way they use the beads and the blocks to ... teach them about quantities . seems to be really effective." Morin said her daughter is now 8 years old, has developed strong math skills, and is learning the Montessori way at N.J. MacPherson School, where a partnership with Yellowknife Education District 1 (Yk1) offers the specialized method to students up to Grade 5 at no cost to parents. She said Montessori grade school offered further south isn't free.

Two-and-a-half may sound like a young age to have children attending school, but Morin said the things they learn do sink in.

"It really depends on the child, but developmentally my children were ready,"she said. "They learn a lot of life skills. If they make a spill, (staff) don't run around and clean up after them and you see that at home. They learn responsibility in a way that doesn't seem like responsibility; it's just fun. Like pretending to be like mommy and daddy, when cleaning up after themselves or helping out at home. Some kids are ready to learn at that age."

David Wasylciw, president of the Montessori Society in the city - which celebrated it's 40th year in Yellowknife Feb. 25 - said the public Montessori program has been run by Yk1 for about ten years.

"We hear ... from Yk1 that the kids who go through the program always do great later in school,"he said.

"It's really incredible how much they learn and by the time they're five-years old some of them are writing."

Wasylciw said a full day of morning and after-school care - offered in two rooms at the school on 52nd street and three classrooms at N.J. MacPherson School - costs parents around $1,000 per month.

"All of our teachers are trained in early childhood education, but they also have to have additional Montessori training which is fairly expensive."

Morin said she thinks it's a good investment for parents, since she's found day care elsewhere in the city averages between $900 and $1,100 per month.

"It's competitive cost-wise and when you get into the kindergarten at Yk1 you don't pay anything,"she said.

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